It had been nearly 5 years since she had last seen him. Five years, and yet it could just as easily have been merely 5 minutes. There was a familiar quality about his face, although it had aged, a sense of comfort. He smiled, and the purity of the emotion seemed to work like a time capsule, pulling her back to an hour when she too had felt so honestly, so truly.


As she stared into his breathtaking eyes, twinkling pale blue against his ivory skin, she couldn’t help but see the scene that had once haunted her every move pass before her in a flash. The pouring rain, the sound of tires as they sped away never to return, the smell of salty tears against her skin. A thickness filled her throat at the visions. She had tried so hard to forget, so hard to push away the pain, and yet with one look at him it all flooded back to her. She was seventeen again and he was everything.


Why was it that still, after all this time, he had a power of her? Within a moment of being in his presence she felt a tingling coarse through her like some exhilarating drug. As it made its way through her veins, she could not believe she had ever survived with out it. He was her oxygen.


She sighed into herself, letting the feeling of him envelope her like a blanket. Unfortunately, as she let him in, she also let in the stabbing pang of heartbreak, the sad truth that was her reality. Just as before, the visions of the end cascaded before her eyes, like some horrifying movie, that she couldn’t look away from.


It wasn’t supposed to be like this anymore. She knew that as honestly as she knew the existence of her own hand, clenched tightly in her jacket pocket. People from the past weren’t supposed to mean this much, not from just a glance, not from just an instant. Yet, in a strange way, she felt like she had found something long lost, although deep down she knew he had never truly belonged to her.


She had loved him, everyone knew that, and he had loved her too once, or so it had seemed. But, as is usually the case with these things, the purity of true love just didn’t seem to be enough. Adolescents are by their nature fickle, fleeting beings, distracted by every shining thing that catches their fancy. There are those instances of greatness, those flickering moments of perfection, of a future, but mostly there is just blurs of moments, faces, names.


Was that what she had been to him, merely a blurred moment in an endless stream of meaningless memories? Could it be that the boy who had shaped her past, present, and undoubtedly her future, had no strong recollections of her? She felt herself shuddering, unsure if it was the coldness of the hour or the coldness of her own thoughts, her own realizations.

There had been no official breakup. For some odd reason, now that felt almost like a triumph rather then a lack of closure. Of course, if she were being honest with herself she would have to admit that there had never truly been anything official to break up, but women in heartbreak are rarely honest with themselves.


Suddenly, he rose, and lifted his hand in a sort of wave. She too rose her hand, reaching for the familiar warmth of his palm. Yet, as she stretched out her frail fingers, they were met with glass rather then flesh, a piercing coldness rather then a comforting heat.


No, women in heartbreak are rarely honest to themselves, for it is much easier to lie then to face the truth. Facing the truth is like admitting a defeat, accepting a failure, and no woman is willing to embrace the idea of inadequacy. Yet, she could no longer pretend, he was gone from her, just as he always had been. She had seen but had not been seen, just as she had lost but had not been lost. He had disappeared from her life again, just as easily as he had driven away that stormy night, and once again she was trapped on the outside looking in.